addition to her trial Mary Ridley never confided to any one, but it still thrilled through and through her at any allusion to that old long past tragedy. Both of them!--the man whose best love was due to her, and the man who had caught her own girlish shy eyes, all unaware to either, somehow, innocently, unavowedly, in such a visionary way as harmed no one; both! It was hard. She wept for them both tenderly, abundantly, for the one not less than the other; and a little--with a cry in her heart of protestation and appeal--for herself, put aside, thrown over for this woman who was nothing, who was nobody, yet who was better beloved than she. All this had welled up in Lady Stanton’s heart when she saw the little girl who had Lily’s face. She had been unable to restrain the sting of old wonder and pain; the keen piercing of the old wound which she had felt to her heart. Both of them! and now a little ghost of this Lily, her shadow, her representative, had come back again to look her in the face. She cried as she drove back that long silent way by herself to Elfdale. It was seldom she had the chance of being so long alone, and there was a kind of luxury about it, not unmingled with compunction and a sense of guilt. For it still remains to be told how Mary Ridley came to be Lady Stanton, although Lord Stanton, who was the betrothed husband of her youth, had been killed, and all that apparently smooth and straightforward story had ended in grief and separation. She had married after some years a middle-aged cousin of her dead lover, Sir Henry Stanton, who had not long before come back from India where he had spent most of his life. It was but a poor fate for the beautiful Mary. Sir Henry had left his career and a full accomplished life behind him, when he first came to settle at Elfdale to the passive existence of a gentleman in the country, who could scarcely be called a country gentleman. He had been married and had children, a family of sons and daughters, and had only a second chapter of less vivid meaning, a sort of postscriptal life, to offer her. Why she had accepted him nobody could well say,--but she made him a good wife, kind, smiling, always gentle, though sadly put to it now and then to preserve unbroken the sweet good-temper with which nature had gifted her. So fair and sweet as she was, to get only the remains of a man’s heart after all, to be made use of as their chaperon and caretaker by his big, unlovely daughters; to have her own children, two dainty, lovely, fairy girls, kept in the background,--no more than “the little ones”--of no account in the house--all these things were somewhat trying, and a strange reversal of all that life had seemed to promise her, and all that had been indicated by the early worship which surrounded her youth. But perhaps few women could have carried this inappropriate fate as well. All those contradictions of circumstances, all those travesties of what might have been, met with no gloom or